by Adam Roberts
‘George,’ Ergaste said, changing the subject abruptly and fixing him with his fierce eye. ‘It’s time to light a fire underneath them. Not been properly trying to recover your girl, have they. Not incentivized.’
‘I’ve visited the area,’ said Dot, coming to life like a robot. ‘It’s an area I know. They’re following the official lines, with an eye on the lawsuit they know is coming – everything they do is so that they have a case for court. But actually finding your daughter is not part of that strategy.’ She had one of those opaque, matt, whiny London accents.
George gave voice to his new catchphrase. ‘I don’t understand.’ Oh, but it’s always sincerely meant. It always is.
‘Dot knows the zone,’ boomed Ergaste. ‘She’ll sort it, if anyone will. Her help is my gift to you.’
‘You are very,’ said George, staring dreamily at Ergaste’s large face. ‘Fat,’ he said.
Ergaste cleared his throat. There was a pause. Then, visibly, he decided that George had just said kind. ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘You’ve been to hell. Least I couldoo.’
‘There’s a flitter on the roof,’ said Dot, standing up.
They flew over west London; grey black roofs and the myriad glints of many pools. Standing water, mostly. At Heathrow they boarded a ramjet to Tbilisi. Dot sat with ninja stillness in the seat opposite George the whole way. ‘Have you,’ he asked, alternately licking and sucking an orange-vodka lolly, ‘worked kidnapping cases often?’
‘Crime paradigms have changed,’ she said. ‘The New Hair changed the nature of crime.’
‘Well,’ said George, watching the clouds bob past. ‘The New Hair changed everything, I suppose.’
Dot seemed not to blink as she watched his face. There was something discomfiting about her gaze. George tried meeting it, but he ended up looking away. He knew what that gaze meant. It meant: nothing changed for you. It meant: that’s a definition of rich. Wealth is mankind’s oldest buffer against change. It meant: you have no idea. But that’s not true! He thought those words to himself. I do have an idea. I have several ideas. They’re just not my ideas. I have acquired them from others, as is the case for all my possessions.
Shortly they were swinging low over Tbilisi. A giant’s causeway of dwellings hemmed by dust-yellow hills; a sprawl of industry: basket-shaped commercial hangars and the myriad upended lampshades of iDishes. Over the outskirts of town a half a dozen sunkites trailed their shadow over the surface of the earth: drawing them up over the heights, dropping them down into the valleys. ‘Why not Tabriz?’
‘Tabriz is for tourists,’ she said, as the plane nudged the ground and settled. ‘Besides, I have an account at Tbilisi.’
She meant, it transpired, a flitter account; and she flew George expertly over the hills southwest and towards the slowly uprising prospect of Ararat. ‘Do you understand why your daughter was taken?’ Dot asked.
‘I don’t understand anything about the world,’ George replied. ‘I mean, about the world outside my Rapunzel tower.’
‘Your what?’
The thing is, George hadn’t particularly meant to say anything in reply to her question. The words had just, as it were, fallen from him. He thought back over them, registering them, and their meaning, for the first time. ‘You know the fairy tale?’
‘You’ll have to enlighten.’
‘It’s just a story – there was a book last year, quite well known. Minnie Keuren starred.’
‘I don’t watch books,’ Dot said, angling the flitter in the air and beginning a wide turn.
‘No? I watch a lot of books. It was a Christmas book. That’s why I watched it. And because I watch everything with Minnie in it. I love her.’ And he thought: that’s a three-word-phrase that pops out of me with remarkable facility! ‘A story about a girl who’s locked in a luxurious room at the top of a very tall tower.’
‘And that’s you, is it?’ Dot prompted.
But George had not considered it from that perspective before. He was going to say: no! I’m the rescuer, not the princess! But he didn’t say that. ‘I suppose,’ he said.
‘It’s not just you. In that position, I mean. There—’
‘What?’
‘Look there.’
The flitter’s angle of flight gave George a clearer view of the ground. A road branched in two. Little dark rectangles scattered along it, like schematic leaves along the branch and boughs of a tree. ‘What am I looking for?’ he asked.
‘There,’ she said again.
The roads, the roofs, the open spaces were filled with human bodies. Many of them were lying horizontally, or slouching back. Presumably they were observing the bluebottle passage of George and Dot in this flitter, perhaps with detachment. A few were in motion, foreshortened to nothing but heads from which scilla-like legs poked and withdrew. ‘People,’ he said.
‘The absolutely poor,’ she said. ‘People with no money.’
‘Money,’ he said.
‘I don’t mean, people with limited funds. I don’t mean people with too little money. I mean people with literally not a cent of money. I mean, people who have never owned and will never own one red cent.’
George looked at her. He heard the words and understood them, but only on what you might call a semantic level. ‘OK,’ he said, tentatively.
‘The ones walking around, the ones doing the work – do you know what they are?’
‘Driven?’ he tried. ‘The get-up-and-goers.’ He pondered. ‘The ones making something of their lives?
She shook her head. ‘They’re women.’
‘Women?’
‘That’s right. And you know why they’re – look—’
It was a dark line scratched in the soil, with a long row of sunbathers lying beside it. In the trench were several miniature coffee-bean-sized figures, and little puffs of dirt being thrown out: diggers. ‘A trench,’ he said.
‘The ones digging it are women.’
‘How can you tell at this altitude?’
‘Trust me.’
She righted the car, gunning the motor and sped past the village. For several minutes George was silent. There was a slumberous sense of the world’s wrongness stirring in his soul. But what could he do about it, anyway? An existential indigestion, uncomfortable and pointless and best dispensed with. What could one person, or any one person, or any person who was him, do? ‘I was going to ask,’ he said, shortly, ‘why are those women digging that trench?’
‘You were going to ask?’ prompted Dot.
‘But I suppose I know the answer already.’
‘And?’
‘Those people lying alongside weren’t recharging their Hair.’
‘I’d wager you a dollar to a Degas they didn’t have hair. Not any more,’ said Dot.
‘Corpses.’
‘They were.’
‘Those women were burying them.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why did they die?’
‘Pissed off the bosses,’ said Dot. ‘Probably. It hardly matters. Cut off their hair and leave them to starve. But it’s the women who dig the grave.’
The lower slopes of the mountain were underneath them now. Over the ridge, like a great page turning beneath them, and the piste came into view – the same coffee-bean-sized individuals, all scurrying and sliding and hurrying. Dot brought the flitter down in the visitors parkyard, and George stepped out, still dressed in the shirt and trousers he’d put on that morning, when he’d expected to spend the day in New York. The chilly fresh air woke him a little. ‘The head of hotel security,’ Dot was saying, ‘has gone on maternity leave. I’ve arranged to meet with Colonel Jamshidiyeh.’
‘OK,’ said George, giving his naked hands alternately a rub and a squeeze.
‘Let me explain the purpose of this meeting,’ said Dot, briskly, as they walked. ‘You will be there in person to explain to the colonel that you are deputizing me. He must be in no doubt that your trust resides in me, and that you will
back any tactic I employ.’
‘OK,’ said George.
‘By back I mean, mostly, money. Yeah?’
‘OK.’
They came in at the main entrance, and were taken straight up to Afkhani’s old office. George recognized the colonel as soon as laying eyes on him.
A functionary brought in coffee, and for a long period everybody sat in silence, toying with the thimblish cups. Dot introduced herself, and explained that she had been retained by Mr Denoone and Mrs Lewinski. Colonel Jamshidiyeh nodded briskly and said ‘I see.’ ‘I have no relationship with the legal side of things,’ Dot said. ‘I am not gathering evidence for any lawsuit. Do you understand?’
‘I comprehend you very well,’ said the colonel.
Then Dot said something lengthy in what sounded to George like very fluent local lingo. The expression on the colonel’s face did not change. ‘Faghat negah mikonam,’ she concluded. ‘Faghat negah mikonam. My only interest is to locate the girl.’
Jamshidiyeh looked at her. Then he looked at George, and back at Dot. ‘I wish you very good luck,’ he said. Then he said something in Arab-speak, talking very rapidly in a low voice. Then he stood up. ‘I of course offer you any and all assistance.’
Dot said: ‘Thank you.’ The interview was over. On the way back to the flitter, George asked: ‘What did you say to him, when you spoke Arab?’
‘It was Farsi. I explained that of course he knew a lawsuit was likely, but that I had no interest in that, one way or another. I told him I genuinely wanted to find the girl. I explained that I had complete powers of proxy. He said their attempt to locate the girl had been strenuous, and far-reaching, but if I wanted to press my own enquiries then good luck. He was glad, I think.’
‘Glad?’
‘No, not glad. That suggests he cares either way. He doesn’t. But he’s content for somebody else to come and shake the tree, see if anything falls out.’
They got back in the car. ‘Will you find her?’
‘I can’t promise I will, Mr Denoone. But I can promise I’ll try harder than they did.’
The car bounced upwards. George’s stomach pressed into the cradle of his pelvis. Cloud hurried down to embrace them. A few moments of fog, and then up into bright sky again. The sun shone. They passed a few dozen metres from a seeding blimp, fat as a European socialite, or a New York supermodel. Then they were sweeping away through the enormous, compliant air of the third world.
14
Awaiting his ride home to New York, Dot and George had a conversation in a bar at Tbilisi air-station. Used to travelling in the company of affluent tourists George found the surrounding press of beaky, harsh-eyed businessmen and -women unsettling. With only a very few exceptions, himself amongst them, everybody was thin. It looked shabby. Seedy, in fact. The predominant dress was advertising pinafores and ponchos. Which is to say: these people were so strapped for cash it was worth their while generating this trickle of cents, even though the garb was deeply unfashionable.
George drank fruit whisky through a straw. Dot had a sherbet. ‘Let’s talk about why your daughter was stolen,’ she said, without preliminaries.
‘OK,’ said George.
‘No,’ said Dot. ‘Wait. A better way of coming at this would be: why, despite the earnest desire of the authorities to recover her, and despite all your money – which we can agree ought to lubricate things nicely – why has she not been found?’
This last phrase was closer to George’s own language. He repeated it, with a Georgesque inflection: ‘Why has she not been found?’
‘So, Nic Neocles changed the world with his invention,’ Dot said, airily, ‘and nothing changed. That’s the thing, actually. Understanding that nothing changes changes everything. There’s no such thing as revolution. Revolution is just another way for things to stay the same. So, there were a few years of violence, but quick enough things settled down into a new pattern – a variation of a very old pattern. The oldest pattern, I suppose.’
‘You’re a little,’ he observed, ‘digressive.’ Was that the right word? But she wagged a finger at him and went on talking.
‘The situation in Ararat – which is to say, practically speaking, in Iran – is the same as the situation all round the whole band of the tropics. Wherever it is sunny, it is the same.’
‘OK,’ he said, assenting to he-knew-not.
‘At village level – or at city-block level in the cities – the bosses run the world. They give out the orders, and dole out the punishments. If a crime is committed in an area, you shake down the bosses, make things either uncomfortable enough, or provide them with inducement enough, to sort out your problem. Otherwise you leave them alone. So, if there’s trouble, lean on the bosses. They lean on the peasants. That works for almost any crime. Indeed, it works so well for most crime that we, higher-up, I mean, never even get to hear anything about it.’
‘Higher-up.’
‘I mean people who have some money, like me. Or people who have lots of money, like you. By lower-down I mean people who have no money at all. Once upon a time, even the lowest of the low had a little bit of money, because in the old days peasants had to eat. Had to eat or die. A dead peasant isn’t any good to a village boss. You can’t get any work out of a dead peasant. So village bosses had to make sure the peasants got subsistence monies – in cash or kind. Enough to eat, enough to live.’
‘The New Hair freed people from that,’ observed George.
‘Just so. Now, you might think it would have freed up the peasants to spend their small money on something else, to better themselves, whatever. All that utopian jibberjabber. But it didn’t. Instead it freed up the bosses to stop giving peasants any money at all. You drink water from the canal; you soak up sunlight from the ever-generous air, and you never need to eat. You may get odd cravings for insects or dirt, but you can scratch around in the mud for that. Otherwise you’re pretty much self-sufficient.’
‘Sure,’ said George.
‘And if you’re a monk, or something like that, then sure, it makes you free – free to sit stylites for decades and commune with God. If you want. But if you’re an honest-to-goodness peasant, all it does is free the bosses to squeeze more money for themselves from your labour. I know what you’re thinking.’
If George had had more gumption he might have riposted: ‘Even I don’t know what I’m thinking.’ But instead he sat silently, and peered at the little glistening circle of fluid in his cup. By tapping the side of the shot-glass he could make a transient circle appear in the middle of the circle.
‘The bosses still need people to do the work, of course,’ Dot was saying. ‘So, you’re thinking: why would any peasant work for any boss? Right? Why don’t they just go off together and start a new village – or rise up and throw the oppressors in the canal? What’s stopping them? They don’t need the bosses for anything, after all – not for money, I mean. They can live by light alone.’
‘Sure,’ said George.
‘It’s the question. It’s the question, actually. And there are three answers. And the third of those three answers is really germane to your unhappy situation, Mr Denoone. I’ll come to that. But let’s do it in order. The first answer has to do with the inertia of the peasants, especially the men. I mean, a deep-dyed ontological inertia. But that sounds a bit racist. Peasantist. I know it does. So people don’t like talking about it. Not like that.’
George knew as much about peasant life as he did about life on the moons of Jupiter, so he held his peace.
‘Another answer, more practical, has to do with the bosses’ power. They can shave your head in a minute. How long would you last with a bald head?’
‘How long?’ George asked. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Hair grows at half-an-inch a month’
‘Half a what?’
‘A little over a centimetre a month,’ Dot said. ‘Less if you’re not well-nourished. So how long until you had enough hair to generate enough energy to keep yourself
alive, from a bald standing-start?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
Something like a smile, or at least a half-inclination of the corner of her mouth, touched Dot’s expression. George hadn’t seen that before. ‘Well, the answer is,’ she said, ‘it depends. But it’s a long time; half a year, nine months, something like that. And, of course, if you’re getting your energy from your hair, then you want that hair to be as long as possible – really you need a three- or four-year growth of New Hair to give you enough energy to work properly. So, if the boss’s men hold you down and shave your head, well – then you’ll die. You’ll die unless somebody supplies you with nutrients – milk say – for the whole course of the intervening period. Do you know anybody who’d be prepared to supply you with milk and meal for half a year? Imagine the cost of it! Remember you don’t have a single cent. Remember you don’t have any means of obtaining money. No one will gift you or loan you a penny. Half a year’s supply of real food – you’d need to be rich as a banker to even contemplate it. So, mostly, you’ll die.’
George thought of the bald-headed corpses he had seen lying by the trench on the trip he’d made to that village. He couldn’t remember the name of the village. He remembered the commissioner describing the whole trip as wild-goose chase. He’d eaten goose in a Tokyo restaurant once. Or gosling, which amounted to the same thing.
‘OK,’ he said.
‘But there’s a third reason,’ Dot said, ‘why people don’t just opt out of the whole village system, go live in the hills or wander the highways. It’s the reason why your daughter got stolen.’
Just at that moment the call shrilled through the bar, and Dot and George shoe-shuffled through to the flexible corridor and onto the ramjet. A minute and a half of settling themselves in their seats. The plane eased into motion on the slipway. It and the ground parted company with a little sigh. George and Dot sat through several minutes of chest-squeezing acceleration at a steep angle, before the belts snaked away and the seats swung round in their floor grooves.